ASUS Rampage Formula LGA775 Intel X48 DDR2-1200 ATX Motherboard

by Asus

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 0.4 x 0.4 x 0.4 inches ; 5.3 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 5.3 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0012EKB2A
• Item model number: Rampage Formula
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #136,511 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 18, 2008

Product Description

X48 LGA775 MAX-8GB DDR2 ATX

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Awesome enthusiast board for overclocking, December 21, 2008

By 

Nathan Beauchamp "ConsumerAdvocate" (Oak Park, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: ASUS Rampage Formula LGA775 Intel X48 DDR2-1200 ATX Motherboard (Personal Computers)

Asus has always been my brand of choice for motherboards, and I've used their boards to build quite a few computers for friends and family. Their P35 and P45 boards are among the best. When it came time to replace the the P5K-e in one of my computers, I wanted to get a new MB that would allow full crossfire performance (the p35 and p45 chipsets don't have two PCIE 16x rails; they have 1 16x rail and one 4x rail for dialed down crossfire performance) it knew I would choose an X48 board because in reviews, they clock out the best in crossfire mode.

I chose the Rampage Formula because of its extreme overclocking potential. I wanted to push my E8400 to 4ghz, and needed a board that would allow it. Many others on overclocking forums were having great results with this board, and so I decided to give it a go.

The board installs like any other Asus board. The lay out is logical and was a breeze to configure. I had the new board up and running in about an hour and a half.

Everything worked great, and I was able to immediatly overclock the processor to a relatively tame 3.4ghz just be adjusting the FSB and raising v-core a tad. However, I was getting very hot NB temperatures. Lowering the NB voltage didn't seem to matter, I was always getting 55-63c temperatures, regardless of idle or under load. After digging around on the Asus forum and overclocking forums, it turns out that some of these boards have really poor contact between the massive copper heatsinks and the chips they're intended to cool. My options at that point were to live with high NB temps OR take out the motherboard and re-seat the heatsinks with Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound.

Of course I decided to re-seat the heatsinks. It was pretty frustrating to have to remove the motherboard I has just installed a few days before. Taking apart the motherboard heatsinks wasn't difficult. The largest that fits over the NB chip unscrews from the motherboard. The others are held in place with push pins (seriously Asus, why are you using push pins on an enthusiast board?) which were also easy to remove. I elected to replace the push pins with plastic screws and nuts from my local Ace hardware.

After removing the heat sinks, cleaning off the Asus thermal paste (which IS JUNK) and replacing it with arctic silver, I bolted down the heatsinks, re-installed the motherboard, and fired the computer up. Fantastic results: the NB temps dropped by 15c! (For very detailed instructions on replacing the thermal compound under the heatsinks, check out Asus' forum. Search "Asus Formula Northbridge."

Now that I'd addressed the heat issues, I began to overclock the chip more aggressively. Fortunately, this board has an amazing bios with every conceivable option and setting. I've been overclocking chips for a long time, and there were a few setting I'd never seen before. But if the basics are still the basics, and I easily achieved a 3.86ghz clock speed using a FSB of 424, a very low vcore of 1.325v, NB at 1.47, and SB at the lowest setting. I could not get things stable until I turned off the 'auto' setting on the dram voltage and dialed it down to 2.0v. After that the system proved very stable and ran Prime 95 for 8hrs with no errors.

Long story short, this is a great board with the exception of the poor quality thermal compound on the NB and SB chips, and the push pins that hold part of the heatsink assembly in place. Replacing those made this board the best I've ever used, and so even though it took two hours to fix the heat sink issue, it was still worth it.

This is definitely an enthusiast board. If don't plan to overclock, buy something a lot cheaper like the Asus P5E X38. This board is be definition FOR OVERCLOCKING. If you're wanting to get the most out of your intel processors, this is a fantastic option, especially if you want a crossfire rig. With two HD4870s in crossfire, my E8400 at 3.8ghz, and 8gb of ram running Vista 64-bit, I scored a 18,500 in 3DMark06, which is very impressive for a dual core system. I can't say enough about this board; it's the best X48 on the market today IMHO.